


Lightweight

by A_Firewatchers_Daughter



Category: The Hour (TV)
Genre: 1945, F/M, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:14:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26889448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Firewatchers_Daughter/pseuds/A_Firewatchers_Daughter
Summary: Randall and Lix met once in their nineteen years apart. St. Andrew's Day, 1945. And all because Randall turned from hardened alcoholic to lightweight.
Relationships: Randall Brown/Lix Storm
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	Lightweight

** 30th November 1945, London **

Randall Brown could have sworn his keys were in his pocket. One of his pockets, anyway.

He should never have gone out with them, nor should he have allowed them to persuade him to have a drink; it was never just a single drink with Randall Brown. However, the last several years had been hard, though Randall didn’t think he would ever be able to acknowledge just how hard, and the general consensus in the office had been that they had earned their drunkenness.

And perhaps they had.

At some stage during this decade of relentless warfare, every person he had worked with had sacrificed something. Some had fought and died, others had fought and barely survived. He knew journalists who had risked their personal safety in their search for truth and accuracy. He knew women who had lost husbands, children who had lost fathers, and plenty of people whose sanity was lost somewhere a few years behind them.

And so, as this year of utter madness had begun its end, Randall Brown had surrendered to the temptation for a drink. He had not had a drink since the outbreak of war, when he had realised he could do his job sober and live, or do it drunk and cost someone their life. He chose sobriety.

Six years, though, was a long time for a body to remember how to drink. He had not stopped at the first, but he definitely had not put back as many as his colleagues.

The number was irrelevant now, though.

The number changed nothing about the fact he was stood outside his home with no keys, on a rather cold St. Andrew’s evening.

The number did not detract from the idiocy he felt as he squinted through the darkness at the ground beneath the flower planter, unable to see his spare key.

Resigned to it, he stumbled to the bathroom window. The lock needed fixed and so could possibly be broken open. Squinting through the darkness, he found the crack and forced his fingernails into it, his foot on the wall to stabilise himself, wiggling it until he could feel it begin to loosen. Or he had thought so. When he slipped, backside first, onto the ground, he realised that this was the one evening that lock had caught properly. Of course. How absolutely typical.

He was not nearly drunk enough to put up with this kind of night.

“Sir?” a voice said behind him. “We’ve received a complaint that a man is trying to break into this building.”

Randall glanced around and found a police officer standing outside a car, a second officer behind the wheel.

“Yes, that would be because it’s my house,” he said irritably. It didn’t come out right; even he knew his speech was impaired by his newfound inability to hold his drink. “Can’t find my keys.”

“Have you any proof you reside at this address, sir?”

“Oh, aye, that’s what I’ve done,” Randall spat, checking his pockets yet again; it was always when his patience was tested that his native accent became its roughest. “I’ve gone to the pub, and rather than go home to my bed, I’ve decided try my hand at a random housebreaking. Do I look like a sixteen-year-old delinquent to you?!”

A hand tightened on his arm. “I think we should go down the station,” said the police officer, “and you can dry out.”

“I’m going nowhere,” snapped Randall as he tried to wrestle the man off. He’d been manhandled enough in the duration of his career, and he wasn’t about to let this idiot do it either. “Get off me!”

“You’re disturbing the peace now.” He increased the pressure on Randall’s arm. “We can do this with handcuffs or without.”

Randall glowered at him, but he did not waiver. He decided to take the easiest path left open to him: he wrenched his arm from the officer’s grip and put himself in the back of the car. At least at a police station, he could call someone. Then it occurred to him that, while he had colleagues with whom he would drink, he had nobody he would contact from a police station.

Who was he supposed to call?

There was only one person he trusted and he had not spoken to her since 1938. He knew she was in the country. He even knew where she worked but had no phone number for her home.

But he knew her. She wasn’t at home. She was sitting at a desk, pouring over the transcripts and recordings from the Nuremberg trials. There was nowhere else she was going to be but where she could obsessively dissect what had been sent from Germany, especially after the showing of the American film.

From the back seat of a police car, Randall Brown decided to tell a lie to avoid a night in the cells. “My wife is working late,” he said to them. “She must have the other key.”

In the half-light, he watched the two men glance at one another, as if deciding whether or not to believe him. Eventually, the driver said, “You can telephone her from the station, but she will need to escort you home. We can’t have you on the street alone in this condition.”

It was a compromise.

As he shifted his weight, he felt the hard glass of the half-bottle he had bought on the way back from the pub. He grinned to himself. At least he had something to pass the time if his ‘wife’ was indisposed.

* * *

It was a horrible thing.

Though she would never admit it to anyone else, Lix Storm was close to tears as she read the transcript of that documentary. It had been shown at the Nuremberg trials the day before last – she had managed to see it yesterday morning – and it would not leave her. She could not even drink those images away.

She had watched it, of course, but here she sat with stills of the dead and the surviving, and she wondered how any of the people who had been complicit in the suffering had it in them to do it. Surely it was human instinct to want to ease an innocent person’s suffering, not exacerbate it. How did one rationalise this in order to carry it out? Was it possible to dehumanise anyone to the point that this was deemed acceptable?

Obviously so, she decided, and the evidence was sitting before her in all its horror.

Lix startled when the telephone rang, disgusted with herself to find she had a tear to wipe away. She lifted the phone. “Yes, hello,” she said; there was little she could do to make herself sound any more composed.

“Lix?” It was a man’s voice. One she knew only too well, and one she had thought was not yet back in the country. “Lix, my dear, I’ve gone and lost my keys. The police caught me trying to get into the house – apparently I may only leave if my beautiful wife escorts me.”

Stunned, she struggled to find the words needed to verbally throttle Randall Brown over the telephone. For a moment, she considered leaving him there to deal with his drunken stupidity alone. It would serve him right; how dare he call her out of the blue like this? And yet, she asked, “Which station?”

“Hammersmith.”

“I’ll hammer you, you bloody fool,” she muttered under her breath.

“What was that, sweetheart?”

“Don’t you have friends who get you out of a spot like this one, Randall? Perhaps the ones you spent the night getting drunk with?”

“No, they’ve gone home. And they’re not my friends, not really.”

“And so you thought you’d ring me up instead, after seven years, and-”

“Please, Lix,” he said. “Please, just come and take me home.”

“Fine!” she half-shouted. “Fine, Randall! I’ll interrupt my evening to save your sorry arse from a night in the cells!”

Lix slammed the phone back down onto the hook before he could say another word to her. The nerve of him. He walked away from her. He had left her to find care for their child. And here he was, using her as a get-out-of-jail-free-card. As she tied the belt around her coat, she vowed that she would never set eyes upon him after this night.

* * *

The cell door opened. Randall rather thought they had put him down here for his cheek rather than for his attempts at housebreaking. And when he saw Lix Storm there, glowering down at him, he would very much have liked to ask the policeman to close the door back over. “Your wife has arrived, Mr. Brown,” said the same officer who had picked him up at the house. “She’s going to take you home.”

It was with a shot of fear that Randall stood up. Not only had he contacted the woman he loved most in the world, but he had infuriated her in doing so. He had seen that look on her face once before, when he had told her he was leaving Spain without her.

She had thrown a crystal ashtray at his head and missed by an inch.

Somewhere in Barcelona, there was a flat whose wall probably still bore the mark of this look she gave him again now.

And he was the idiot who had brought it upon himself to induce that same look in her.

He had to try his luck, for he was left with no option. He strode over and kissed her cheek. “Thank you, dear,” he said to her. “I hope I haven’t disrupted anything terribly important.”

“Oh, no, darling,” she said, her tone sarcastically airy. “Just my report on the evidence given at the Nuremberg trials – where Nazis are answering for one of the greatest atrocities committed in our history – for the benefit of the British public. Just a trivial little thing.”

Randall glanced at the policeman currently closing the cell door behind them. The look the man gave him said plainly, ‘Rather you than me, pal.’

They made their way to the reception, where the bustle of Friday night was seen in the teenagers and drunks being taken in and released. “Where’s the key?” Lix asked shortly.

“I told you,” he replied, “I’ve lost it.”

“Randall Brown, you have never lost a key or anything as essential as a key in your adult life,” she snapped. “Check your pockets.”

“I’ve already checked them!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she growled. She stopped in the middle of reception and rifled through his pockets. She found the half-bottle (three-quarters full) in his coat pocket and thrust it into his hands with a glare of sheer irritation. In the other pocket, she found his cigarettes and lighter. And from his trouser pocket, while he tried to ignore the sensation of her hand against his thigh, she produced – “One key, for one front door.”

Oh, no. He had missed it. He’d had it this entire time. He turned to the WPC behind the desk. “Do you think you could take me back to my cell? Please?”

The young woman smirked and shook her head at him. “Best to get it over with, sir.”

“You don’t know her! She’ll never let this go!”

Lix’s hand wrapped itself around his bicep and suddenly he was pulled from the station to the street, surrounded by cold air. She stared at him for a moment while she decided what to do with him; if he knew her at all, she was seriously contemplating giving him a slap. “Lead the way,” she said.

He obeyed without hesitation, heading in the direction of his home. “Lix,” he said. “What happened to-”

“She’s safe,” Lix said flatly. “That’s all I know, and that’s all I need to know.”

Randall fell silent for a few minutes while they walked. The air had hit him and he felt positively wasted now. To his surprise, Lix’s arm was linked with his. He looked around at her, met with that same hard glare. “Don’t get any ideas,” she warned him. “It’s just that if you fall and spill your brains onto the pavement, it’ll be the ‘wife’ they point the finger at.”

“I’m never drinking again,” he declared solemnly.

“We all say that.”

“I haven’t had a drink since 1939.”

“Oh,” she said. Her stare was appraising now, relating this piece of information to what she could see before her. “Well, that explains how you got in this state. Randall Brown can’t hold his whisky anymore.”

“Nor does he want to.”

“Ah, well. At least one of us remains a functioning alcoholic,” she quipped. “This world is too depraved for me to survive it both sane and sober. It’s one or the other, I’m afraid.”

“Nuremberg?” he asked; it seemed a distant memory now that he had been right to presume she was sitting in an office, obsessing over it.

“Nuremberg,” she sighed.

He directed her to his home and put his hand into his pocket for the key. It wasn’t there. Panicked, he looked up for Lix, only to find she was unlocking the door for him. “Come on, then,” she ushered him impatiently. In familiar surroundings, Randall shed his coat and his hat and placed them on the stand; he turned the hat until it sat at just the right angle.

Once that was at peace, he stalked to the kitchen sink with the half-bottle he had been foolish enough to buy. He opened it and poured it down the drain. When he turned to get rid of the bottle, he bumped straight into Lix. In the full light, he could see how she had changed and where she had not, and that she was still the most wondrous woman he had ever known. Caught somewhere between her beauty and her terror, he was frozen where he stood.

“I love you, Lix Storm. I always loved you.” Perhaps if he’d had the good sense to stay sober, the words wouldn’t have tumbled from his mouth. He wouldn’t have leaned in and gently kissed her, and he would have known better than to take her by the hand.

The smile she gave him, though she had kissed him in return, was a heartbroken one. He realised in that moment that he was never going to see her again. It was too painful for her. He had failed to consider how she would feel about seeing him when he had called her for help. She kissed his cheek and went to the door, leaving him with an empty bottle in his hand.

At the door, she turned. “I love you, too, Randall.”

“Then why must you go?”

“I can’t bear to love you,” she said. Her voice seemed to get lost in her throat; it was rare for Lix Storm to falter. “Not yet. Maybe one day. Just…not yet.”

She left.

Randall went to the sitting room and slumped onto the couch. With a single glance at the empty bottle still clutched in his hand, he reminded himself of the promise he had made when he had been safe with Lix: he really never would drink again. When their paths next crossed, however far into the distance that moment might be, he would be sober and he most definitely would not be calling her from a police station.


End file.
